Golden Age of Television

Spoiler alert: Apple has announced that 1993 will be the final season for the Apple ][ line, a prime time staple of American living rooms since 1977. In related news, Apple is also said to have green lit a third season of the acclaimed TV series Severance.

Apple ][ had a good run, in showrooms from 1977 to 1993 with a long second life in reruns. Almost as long a run in the US as the Mk.I VW Golf, sold here as the Rabbit from 1975, the GTI, and finally the Cabrio until 1993. Maybe Season 3 will reveal a Lumon-badged Laser 128 Apple ][ clone for Severed telework.

Maybe, just maybe, the death of Dark Woz / Mr. Drummond (played by the fabulous Ólafur Ólafsson) and hints of unacknowledged children of the billionaire patriarch tease a more ambitious Apple/Lumon project next season — perhaps a desktop-metaphor machine with a mouse built for a new character. Lisa J, perhaps? Perhaps in Snow White design language to coordinate with Harmony Cobel’s immaculate VW Rabbit.

With Season 2 concluded, pundits are again re-running “Is the New Golden Age of Television Over” pieces. This time, the answer may be yes.

You see, the real New Golden Age of converged computer/television programming began in 1969 with the debut of both the US Public Broadcasting System and Sesame Street. Sesame Street was the flagship production of the Children’s Television Workshop and so closely associated were the two that CTW rebranded itself Sesame Workshop.

Is there a chance we get to the end of 2025 and PBS is gone — and with it the free distribution of some of the finest early childhood educational TV ever produced anywhere? Yeah. There is.

Before the dystopian recycling culture of Apple’s Silo, there were NYC children salvaging a steel drum into a musical instrument.

Sesame Street was followed up by CTW with The Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact for older children — many of whom had grown up with Sesame Street. These non-Sesame franchises ran into stronger headwinds in the marketplace — maybe into the realization that competition for elementary-age eyeballs and affections was a market at all. CTW responded by becoming a wraparound merchandising powerhouse its own right.

The first Sesame-branded toy (according to … muppetwiki) appeared in 1974. The Fisher-Price Movie Player was essentially a Viewmaster with moving pictures. CTW produced several Sesame cartridges for the format. Four years before that multimedia toy, Sesame launched Sesame Street magazine as a companion to the TV show. I only learned from a friend last week that there was also a 3-2-1 Contact magazine. Not only that, but the magazine debuted first. Finding out that the Bloodhound Gang crossed over from print was like finding out that there were Hercule Poirot stories written by Agatha Christie to accompany TV’s Poirot, or that Rex Stout had the portly New York genius Nero Wolfe solve the mystery of Too Many Cooks years before portly New York genius Cookie Monster wolfed Too Many Cookies. (Stout‘s subsequent Too Many Women fiction is actually not a prequel to the current fiction about too many women in civic life)

Astonishing as this was, I was further astonished to learn that Enter, one of my favorite childhood magazines, was also published by CTW. Enter was unlike public television. It was a program listing every month together with video game reviews and a few PopSci-type educational technology explainers all held together with glossy ads.

Enter was booted into a kids’ magazine marketplace already so crowded that you were likely to never see actual tabletop at your childhood dentist waiting room beneath past issues of Highlights, Ranger Rick, Young Miss, Boys Life, and The American Girl.

The magazine crumpled along with the home computer market in the mid-80s, though CTW kept other magazines alive until the dawn of the end of the first New Media era. I surfed a few issues recently through archive.org and I’m little surprised that I have such fond memories, but maybe that was the genius of it. Adult hackers like me weren’t the audience, young proto-hackers were — and were such a niche audience that publishers like CTW and Scholastic were mostly left alone to explore it.

Did it matter? Meryl Alper said it did in her 2014 essay about the largely constructive role of youth-oriented computer magazines on proto-hackers. She concludes that these magazines, Enter among them, depicted hacking as something that belonged in the living room as much as the hobbyist garage.

I don’t know exactly why Enter-style Teen Rogue exposition had trouble making the leap to television. The contemporary Mr. Wizard show ran many segments with period home computers and several aged surprisingly well. PBS itself ran The Computer Chronicles from 1983 until 2002 — around the time of the same New Media collapse that also culled the CTW magazines. The documentary episodes of that news-style show are still perfectly watchable. There’s one playing in a YouTube tab behind this editor right now. Maybe that’s part of the problem. My first computers used the same television as the TV shows. There was no way for me and my computer to participate with TV-based computer material. There was no Bob Ross of BASIC. With Enter in print, I could use both. I think I lost sight of that until I paused YouTube on a Mr. Wizard to look at a snippet of LOGO code. Even if I had a VCR in 1983, I don’t know that I could have paused a frame clearly enough to grab code. It kind of wobbled like bad numbers on a Lumon Macrodata Refinement CRT. Like the MacroDat crew, my television led severed lives and remembered nothing from one to the other.

Why do I think the new Golden Age of Television is at risk now for any reason beyond all-purpose enshittification? Well, because PBS and Sesame are at risk, together with organizations that saw kids and technology as missions, not markets. Because tariff-driven stagflation will make technology more expensive, not less. Because of a misguided rebranding of ‘hacking’ to ‘coding’ and of a growing belief that AI will relieve the monotony of coding. Maybe mostly because the idea of a subscription-free, ad-free way to reach homes — in America and around the world — is itself now viewed with suspicion by policymakers and appropriators.

Perhaps in some future Sesame franchise, some kids find an abandoned bitcoin mining rig in a field, unlock it with a hammer and blowtorch, and program it to make beautiful music. In the meantime, ask yourself if you‘re allowed to properly hack the device you’re using to read this. Can you do it in the living room? Is it an activity suitable for children? If not, why not?

Richard Stallman’s “GNU Manifesto” was developed online but it was on newsstands 40 years ago this month in an actual magazine – the March ‘85 issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal of Software Tools. The idea that software can be protected speech, exempt from export control is just a norm, just as the idea that digitally-shared software, even free software, cannot be limited through tariff. Norms, it turns out, are more #pragma than #define.

Maybe we’ll find out in Season 3 if re-integration is in the cards for Mark S and Helly R. Whatever the ethics of the fictional version of the severance procedure, the ethics of using a split to divide and control translate pretty well to the real world.